Fruit Juice: Don’t Be Fooled

Fruit juice sounds so totally healthy. Drinking a sweet drink made from apples or oranges surely must be about a thousand times better than drinking a Coke or a Pepsi. Many parents would rather cut off their arm than put a nasty old soda in their baby’s sippy cup. Yet they go ahead and pour sickeningly sweet, sugar-laden apple or orange juice in their little ones’ cups and flood their fresh little bodies with one of the most dangerous elements known to man-sugar. CBS Health Watch reports,

A growing body of science is linking sweet drinks, natural or otherwise, to a host of child health concerns, everything from bulging bellies to tooth decay. “All of these beverages are largely the same. They are 100 percent sugar,” Dr. David Ludwig, an expert on pediatric obesity at Children’s Hospital Boston, said recently. “Juice is only minimally better than soda.”?

Well-known health advocate Dr. Joseph Mercola refers to fruit juice as “soda’s evil twin.”

When you pick up a bottle of juice at your local grocery store, you may notice several things on the label that are very deceptive. First, you may notice the sugar and carbs don’t seem as high as what you read on your soda label. But not so fast! Check out the portion size and you will probably find it does not represent the entire bottle. Factor in the amount of sugar and carbs for the whole bottle and you’ll see that the fruit juice has as much sugar as the soda has, ounce for ounce-and in some instances more.

Another deception (and this is not limited to just fruit juices) is the bold pronouncement “No sugar added.” Yes, it does mean that there is no sugar added, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. There is a pretty good reason why they added no sugar-the fruit juice was totally saturated with sugar already. And if it isn’t sweet enough in its original state, they can simply extract a little water and it will become proportionately sweeter- and they still haven’t added a grain of sugar! The key is not whether sugar has been added; it is how many grams of sugar you are bombarding your body with when you drink that glass of juice.

And then there are the “fruit drinks.”

These are doubly deceptive. They mix a tiny bit of fruit juice with a lot of water, throw in a little color, and then dump in loads of sugar. To make up for what they take away

they add a vitamin or two and proudly call it “fruit drink.”

Source: Leadershipng